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Copyright by Jonathon N. Anderson 2019 GENRE AND AUDIENCE RECEPTION IN THE RAKE’S PROGRESS by Jonathon N. Anderson, BM THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The University of Houston-Clear Lake In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements For the Degree MASTER OF ARTS in Literature THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CLEAR LAKE MAY, 2019 GENRE AND AUDIENCE RECEPTION IN THE RAKE’S PROGRESS by Jonathon N. Anderson APPROVED BY __________________________________________ David D. Day, J.D., Ph.D., Chair __________________________________________ Craig H. White, Ph.D., Committee Member RECEIVED/APPROVED BY THE COLLEGE OF HUMAN SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES: Samuel Gladden, Ph.D., Associate Dean __________________________________________ Rick J. Short, Ph.D., Dean Acknowledgements To Drs. White and Day, I offer my gratitude for your willingness to let me follow tangents and guesses throughout my graduate career. Dr. White, your generous indulgence, encouragement, and patient guidance helped me refine my fuzzy hunches to clearly articulated ideas. Dr. Day, your depth of knowledge on, enthusiasm for, and sense of humor with medieval works brings them to life and illuminates their continued relevance. I appreciate the priority both of you place on the excitement conjured by texts ancient and modern. To my parents, I offer my gratitude for maintaining a house strewn with interesting books waiting to be discovered. Mom, I appreciate all our late-night conversations about whatever random volume I happened to be curious about at the time. Dad, I hope I’m making good on the lifetime of blind confidence in my abilities you’ve given me. To Peg and Ed, the best in-laws anybody could ask for, thank you for your inspiration and advice. Hearing your confidence that “Boyfriend could rock his Master’s—he reads this stuff for fun” helped me more than you know. Kirby, my sweet Creole queen, you’re my muse and my best friend. Our late nights talking in the study always helped me rally my determination. And throughout this journey you’ve also tested my resolve … in all the best ways. And Edward: honestly, you were no help, other than letting me work on my “homework” while you colored or climbed on me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. iv ABSTRACT GENRE AND AUDIENCE RECEPTION IN THE RAKE’S PROGRESS Jonathon N. Anderson University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2019 Thesis Chair: David Day, J.D., Ph.D. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s libretto for Igor Stravinsky's 1951 opera The Rake's Progress has challenged audiences' expectations since its premiere, especially concerning its narrative arc. These frustrations resolve in Auden's cultivation of two endeavors integral to his larger oeuvre: inspiration from medieval literature, and a desire to represent the manifold, contradictory experience of the individual in modern existence. Rake’s expression of these purposes bypasses opera’s typical emotional intensity and forthright characterization, but the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman reveals a dramatic foundation for its narrative. Far from the overwrought, haphazard assortment of literary allusions its critics often assume, the libretto sets four traditions in counterpoint: medieval, fairy tale, eighteenth-century, and existential. These sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradictory referents account for the work’s narrative tensions and continue Modernist experiments Auden attempted in other major works of the 1940s while anticipating the ironic embrace of indeterminacy and multiplicity that characterizes postmodernism, reclaiming a great twentieth-century collaboration for fresh appreciation. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1 Coffee and Whisky ................................................................................................. 5 Edification If Not Enjoyment.................................................................................. 7 A Fixed Body of Works Endlessly Recycled ....................................................... 10 A Peculiar Type of Illusionist ............................................................................... 12 CHAPTER II: “THY RAVISHING PENITENCE BRIGHTENS ALL THE PAST”: EVERYMAN AND PLOT STRUCTURE IN THE RAKE’S PROGRESS ........................ 17 Auden and Medieval Literature ............................................................................ 17 Tom Rakewell and Everyman ............................................................................... 20 Similar Spiritual Journeys ..................................................................................... 22 Spiritual Insufficiency of Carnal Pleasures. .............................................. 22 The False Security of Ethical Obligation .................................................. 24 The Vanity of Materialism ........................................................................ 26 Abject Contrition ...................................................................................... 29 Next Steps: Allusion, Closure, and Audience Reception in The Rake’s Progress ................................................................................................................ 35 NOTES .............................................................................................................................. 42 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 43 vi CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION The libretto written by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman for Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress poses perennial challenges to an audience’s “horizon of expectations.” The opera stages a twentieth-century interpretation of a fifteenth-century morality play in an eighteenth-century idiom for a genre dominated by nineteenth-century Romantic conventions. Simply put, the Rake libretto’s structure and narrative arc more closely resemble those of medieval morality plays than those in the mainstream, primarily nineteenth-century grand opera repertory (e.g. Verdi, Wagner, Puccini). Subtitled “A Fable,” the libretto exchanges the familiar operatic tropes of unbridled passion and extraordinary reversals of fortune for allegorical characters and a theme of “facing death and coming to terms with life” (“Everyman” 1629). The audience’s interpretive confusion, occasioned by the piece’s apparent “identity crisis” on the operatic stage, is further complicated by intricate patterns of allusion and intertextuality, as four independent literary traditions vie for the listener’s attention. In addition to the eighteenth-century, Augustan surface style indebted to Alexander Pope and John Dryden, the libretto text assimilates literary components derived from Existentialism, fairy tales, and medieval texts including William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegorical poem Piers Plowman and the fifteenth-century play Everyman. As in most of the critical work on the Rake libretto, Auden is treated as the primary author who was principally responsible for the text. Although he claimed a “corporate personality” for authors working in collaboration and took great pains to inform reviewers of Chester Kallman’s contributions to the Rake libretto, the fact remains that Auden and Stravinsky developed the opera’s scenario together long before Kallman became involved (Auden, “Translating” 483). This is not to devalue Kallman’s contributions to the finished text—he usually gets credit for the suggestion of the “three wishes” as a structural device, for example— but rather to acknowledge the libretto’s strong thematic and rhetorical continuity with the vast 1 oeuvre of one of the major poetic voices of the mid-twentieth-century. As Daniel Albright observes, “there is nothing in The Rake’s Progress which falls outside the orbit of Auden’s intellectual world” (45). The obligations of Auden’s intellectual world expanded in proportion to his professional reputation, coming to include book reviews, articles for both popular magazines and literary journals, and lectures by the 1940s. Matthew Paul Carlson suggests the “variety of publication outlets in which Auden’s ideas found a home reflects the disparate qualities of his prose style, which ranges from the casually witty to the deeply philosophical” (“Opera Addict” 70-71). More important for the present discussion, this range of professional roles afforded Auden, a practicing poet concerned with the place of poetry in the modern world, the opportunity to work through his theoretical position from a variety of aesthetic, practical, and informal perspectives. In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” an early essay in his 1962 collection The Dyer's Hand that began life as his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, W.H. Auden condenses his wide variety of concerns as a reader and critic to two essential questions: 1) “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” and 2) “What kind of a guy inhabits this poem” (“Making” 50- 51)? Considering the symbiotic relationship between his thinking on critical matters and his ever-evolving approach to poetic craft, these two questions highlight a basic duality in his own art, inviting his readers to embrace both “technical” and “broadly moral” concerns. His finesse moving between the two is one of the hallmarks of his best-known works—from early poems characterized by what Edward Mendelson calls “a laconic Old English toughness” (“Who stands, the crux left of the